Tags
Fox19 Movie Review – Will Smith & ‘Focus’
27 Friday Feb 2015
Posted Gigs
in27 Friday Feb 2015
Posted Gigs
in27 Friday Feb 2015
Posted Musings
inThis week, I’m 0-for-2 when it comes to my early tagline scouting for the new releases.
I imagined the new Will Smith vehicle, Focus, as a lost-weekend adventure from Rusty Ryan’s (Brad Pitt’s Machiavellian right hand con man) past, some interlude between the big Ocean’s star-studded team-ups intent on taking down whatever big target had bothered George Clooney’s Danny Ocean. I assumed Focus would be darker toned, grittier maybe (think The Grifters minus the incestuous twists), with a dry and dangerous wit about it. The R-rating signaled a willingness to delve into edgier territory.
What I got instead was something far more familiar, but no less welcome, I suppose. Focus is all about its movie star – one Will Smith – aiming to convince us that he is still, in fact, Will Smith, the movie star. Stars, as we all know, are conning us; much moreso than performers who accept the “actor” label, because the star is willingly engaging in deception and distraction, as a game. They never want us to forget or ignore that we are watching a “star” at work. They aren’t trying to slip inside the skin on a character. The plan is to simply use their incredible charm and immense swagger to portray a heightened version of what audiences want to believe they are like. This effort focuses our attention on the allure and appeal of said “star” so that the filmmaker can use their sleight of hand to deflect our expectations.
Smith has gotten stuck “acting” of late (playing second fiddle to his own son in After Earth and a shady & devilish cameo in Winter’s Tale), seeking to invest in character (and by extension, make us invest and engage with these characters, which means he has paid less attention to his own star power, thus allowing the potential to wane a bit. Focus brings it all back into, well, you know, focus.
And it mostly works. You can’t take your eyes off Smith and co-star Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) as the deliciously deceptive duo – with more on the way thanks to a later team-up in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad – who pinch and pilfer wallets and watches as part of a co-ordinated team of professionals, run by Smith’s character, that will make everyone re-think the idea of security in crowded environments. Smith is the face and the brains of the operation, the ultimate insider and natural born con-man (who we are told learned the trade from his father and his father’s father). But something happens when Smith encounters the rookie Robbie, a blinding beauty in need of refinement. He feels her out (and up) during an early sequence that seeks to match the easy sensuality of that trunk scene between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. The Focus frame doesn’t quite live up to that standard, but it certainly earns respect in the game.
I found myself constantly coming back to Clooney, as I was watching Focus and even moreso now as I’m wrangling my thoughts. Clooney, the movie star, teases us with a more rugged charm offensive that owes much to older, earlier generations of movie stars. He looks and feels like he belongs to that by-gone era of the leading man, whereas Smith is the epitome of what a modern movie star should look like. Eternally youthful, maturing gracefully into this mid-career period (which means he still has the ability to play “ageless”), but aware, from a professional standpoint that he should seek the “star” roles while they are available to him.
The movie lets him down a bit, by not giving him enough of the improvisational jazz and kink (the illicit thrills) a thrilling con job should. We should always know that there’s never any doubt that our heroic star will win in the end, but we want a moment’s hesitation and fear that “something” could happen that might cause them to blink. Focus doesn’t truly want us to worry that deeply. It is all about restoring the luster of Will Smith, and it walks away with a win, in that respect.
The weekend B-side, in terms of the new major releases, The Lazarus Effect had me thinking it was offering something along the lines of Pet Semetary meets Flatliners, when it turns out the aim here was more akin to a re-animated Lucy with nods to the new dark side (Paranormal Activities, Insidious, the usual suspects in the current horror franchise sweepstakes). Too bad it pretends to want to be something more though. It aspires to spiritual and philosophical depth – questions surrounding scientists playing God or whether God can be explained away by science – but it wanders around the same tired desolate corridors that every other would-be killer does and kills and kills again for the same no-good reasons.
The thing is, I realize now that I’m willing to follow Olivia Wilde (Drinking Buddies) and Mark Duplass (The One I Love) into the dark, eager to see where the flickering trail takes us. They’ve hooked me with their indie credibility that promises to make even standard studio shenanigans interesting. What I should be waiting for though is a chance for them to return to their roots, far away from studio genre fare, where their brand of quirk, character, and brains reigns supreme.
If I could access and use more of my brain, either before or after a death experience, I would like to think I might want to do something more profound than just kill others. In the New Testament, we never truly find out what life was like for Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead, but I want to believe he took that second chance and lived hard. Why waste it, right? (tt stern-enzi)
26 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted Black Eye
in25 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
inDavid Cronenberg’s biographic listing on IMDB refers to him as “the King of Venereal Horror” or “the Baron of Blood,” because in his oeuvre those elements are so in-your-face, and yet there is always the sense that Cronenberg understands and appreciates maintaining a necessary remove, a dramatic distance that allows for a potentially clear-minded examination of the fetish on display. He wants his audience to consider the frightening impact of what lurks inside of us, coursing beneath the surface.
Cronenberg teased us early on with Scanners in 1981 and then two years later with Videodrome, but it should be noted that “teasing” is definitely a relative term when applied to what Cronenberg laid bare on the screen. There was a fascination with power of the extra-sensory sort and the inevitable abuses of said abilities. But Cronenberg sought to insert us inside the minds of those about to unlock this potential; he wanted us to feel the fear of letting go, of surrendering to powerfully dark urges, because it was about exposing the bloody horrors inside our psyches and our bodies. To be fair, though, most of the attention he drew arose from how he rendered the devastating effects on the body.
Who can forget the images from Videodrome featuring the melding of bodies and technology that were far more surreal than many of the science fiction-based depictions? Cronenberg enjoyed capturing oozing mutations out of psychotropic-induced dreamscapes. And he took us even further in The Fly (1986), forcing us to watch Jeff Goldblum’s metamorphosis into a giant fly/human hybrid, while never allowing the brilliant scientist’s complex humanity to disappear from view.
Following The Fly, he burrowed into the twisted minds for richer horrors waiting to be told.
Dead Ringers offered up twin gynecologists (Jeremy Irons) with the most unhealthy appetites when it came to studying the human body and the competitive (and weirdly symbiotic) links between them. Dead Ringers presented the horror of identity conflict; the battle of wills when outside forces (like love) threatened the fragile truce between what amounted to a shared consciousness.
On it goes, this thematic war, this chess match Cronenberg seems to constantly play with himself; sometimes wallowing in raw displays of violence wrought on either the flesh or the spirit, yet at other times dressing it up in genre garb — as in Eastern Promises, where he reined in the excesses by channeling them through a mob thriller exercise, or in A Dangerous Method, with its decidedly more literal exploration of the psyche. Even in A History of Violence, Cronenberg fashions a contemporary experiment for himself with a protagonist (Viggo Mortensen) seeking to walk away from his dark past only to be dragged back to his roots after an act of violence transforms him into a local hero.
He knows that you can’t escape the themes of your life, so it is fitting that Maps to the Stars, his latest effort, thoroughly embraces the churning stew of bodies and blood and broken personas (with screenwriter Bruce Wagner) by setting this freak show in Hollywood among a celebrity family forever chasing its ghosts and demons.
An obviously unstable burn victim (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the scene of the crime, choosing to wander the margins with a limo driver-cum-would-be-writer/actor (Robert Pattinson) until the time is right to reveal herself. An insecure actress (newly minted Oscar winner Julianne Moore) frets and pouts over the chance to play a role originally played by her more famous mother, who is now haunting her daughter from beyond the grave. And a far too mature child performer (Evan Bird) attempts to navigate his way through the industry pitfalls with precious little “real” support from his parents (John Cusack and Olivia Williams), who are too busy failing to maintain their own precarious hold over their secrets and lies.
What emerges from this intentionally empty mix is vintage Cronenberg, scenes of raw debasement abound from a precious bird’s eye view, but the discerning viewer will notice a new wrinkle. Maps to the Stars appropriates tropes from our current interest in the undead, cleverly defining this setting as a wasteland full of walking-dead types that are not quite the traditional zombies we know and love. Instead, these soulless creations belong exclusively to Cronenberg, who presents them with far more wit and, dare I say, affection than novelist Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) did in his adaptation of The Informers, which trafficked in similar territory. Maps to the Stars shows what happens when a native like Cronenberg leads the way. (Opens Friday) Grade: B (tt stern-enzi)
25 Wednesday Feb 2015
Tags
Documentary director Gabe Polsky, one of the producers of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, conceptualized Red Army, it would seem, as a sly deconstruction of the Cold War politics between the United States and the former U.S.S.R. from the perspective of Russian hockey players. The film sets up the Communist propaganda machine for toppling by showing how the system gave birth to a generation of top-flight athletes schooled within a militarized environment that exploited these individuals far more than a more capitalist/democratic approach ever would.
Yet it is difficult to ignore the reality that such rigidity and restriction also created a breed of players who would revolutionize the sport by injecting the game with a beauty and highly precise communal spirit as well as an allegiance to the old ways that cannot be considered categorically (and/or absolutely) wrong. The Cold War is over, but there are still lessons, vital ones in fact, that could impact the current landscape and the future. (PG) Grade: B+
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Briefs, CityBeat Archives
24 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted Gigs
in24 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted Black Eye
in24 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
inBy T.T. Stern-Enzi
In the current world of British cinema, there is likely no greater practitioner of the art form than Mike Leigh. Over the years, he has fine-tuned a signature improvisational process that now serves as a stylistic imprint; deciding upon a story idea, corralling a crew of collaborators (already intimately familiar with his process), setting up character and narrative workshops – which allow the performers to begin to live in the realm and skin of the characters – and then using the cameras to observe the interactions that unfold. This is the spirit of jazz at work, except the scale is unfathomably larger and more complex. I would liken it to a trio or quartet of musicians with years logged together to the extent that they have that magical intuitive rapport those outside the music simply can’t grasp. But instead of three or four players, we’re talking about a small orchestra enjoying the same kind of mind-melding. It is a working hive mentality that must have a creative force at the center of it all.
And that would be Mike Leigh.
His credited works seem to slip under the mainstream radar – “High Hopes” (1988), “Life is Sweet” (1990), “Naked” (1993), “Secrets & Lies” (1996), Vera Drake” (2004), “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008) – but he has been recognized by the Academy, earning seven nominations (directing and writing for “Secrets & Lies,” writing for “Topsy-Turvy,” directing and writing again for “Vera Drake,” and then twice more for writing – “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Another Year”). He’s never won a gold statue and many question if, especially in the writing category, he is not given enough credit for commanding this unique process. Will it take years, decades (likely after he is gone) for us to grant him the recognition he deserves?
It would seem Leigh is in some ways like J.M.W Turner (Timothy Spall), the artistic protagonist at the heart of his latest film “Mr. Turner.” The painter enjoyed celebrated status within the insular art world of England during the early-to-mid 1800s, known for his watercolor landscapes that held equal footing alongside the more historic paintings that were in fashion at the time.
What Leigh shines a light on though is the more prickly, eccentric aspects of the man later on. Turner exploited the affections of his long-time housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson) and spent years denying the extent of the relationship he has with Sarah Danby (Ruth Sheen), while also the possibility that her two daughters were his offspring. In addition he took up with Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey), the widowed owner of a seaside resort he routinely visited prior to the death of Mr. Booth (Karl Johnson). But the most meaningful personal dynamic that impacted Turner was his relationship with his father William (Paul Jesson) who lived with him for 30 years and served as his studio assistant.
For all of these questionable character traits, Leigh and Spall (a veteran performer in the Leigh drama fold) maintain a keen and steady eye on what made Turner tick – painting. Their portrait never strays from the art and craft constantly driving this mercurial man. Everything Turner sees and hears finds its way onto the canvas, all of his personal experiences lend themselves to the shadings and bursts of color.
The romantic in me wants to believe this painterly approach mimics Leigh’s creative process with each player and their input in the improvisational environment serving as an element in Leigh’s color palette or a brush at his disposal. There is no judgment from Leigh, as to Turner’s behavior, and that would seem to be in keeping with Leigh, a figure in the film community born long before the airing of personality through social media. The only thing that matters is the work. Check out “Mr. Turner” now and get ahead of the rush to judgment on Leigh’s greatness as a master of his craft.
20 Friday Feb 2015
Posted Gigs
in20 Friday Feb 2015
Posted Gigs
in